Beach Profile on Magali Amos July 18th

At 6:00 my mom and I met Ellie and Anna at Magali Amos for a beach profile. First as we were walking along to the end of the beach, a tourist asked us what we were doing and Ellie tried to discourage the tourist when she said the turtles come out at night and they're easily scared. When we reached the end of beach, we took the GPS coordinates and I read them to Ellie. Then we used a tape measure and measured 40 meters along the water line. The tape measure only went to 30 meters so we had to measure 10 extra meters.

The weather was extremely windy and it kept twisting the tape measure up and blowing it down into the water and sand. Every 40 meters we stopped and used metal poles to measure the top of the beach lined up to the horizon. We used two sets of poles; one person, Anna, stood at the highest point on the sand while I held the second pole near the water. Anna and Ellie squatted down and saw where the top of the beach meets the horizon line.

We recorded this number along with the GPS and measured how wide the beach was at these points every 40 meters for the entire length of the 200 meter long beach. This data is used to decide if the beach is suitable for females to nest on or if nests need to be relocated. If there are nests, researchers can decide whether they are at risk for flooding at high tide or during a storm. Even though this shift was a bit boring, I know the data will be very important.